Saturday 29 May 2010 19.02 EDT
First published on Saturday 29 May 2010 19.02 EDT

Sean Haldane is a poet and consultant clinical neuropsychologist working with the NHS in east London. His collected poems Always Two, were published last year. He is a nominee for the post of professor of poetry at Oxford University.

Would it be fair to say you lead a double life, as a poet and neuroscientist?

Well, I've been working in psychology and neuropsychology for 30 or 40 years. I decided ages ago that if I were a poet, I didn't want to make a career of it. So I had to make a living another way. I tried farming, I tried living off the land in Canada. I tried publishing, and then I gravitated toward psychology and neuropsychology.

Your poetry has seemed to come quite sporadically: in the introduction to Always Two, you talk about waiting for poetry to overtake you. That makes it sound like an involuntary act?

I think that's right. It is as if you have a voice in your head speaking poems. If that sounds mystical, then I know enough of neuroscience to make it less so. The brain's right hemisphere, for example, "talks" under certain circumstances to the left hemisphere. That can feel like an alien voice, or that something new is happening in the mind that is coming from somewhere else. I wouldn't want to make a mystery of poetry, but I have never felt it has been in my control.

What does your professional life involve?

As I am getting older and somewhat senior in the NHS, I do about half clinical work, mostly assessing diseases of memory, dementia, some acquired brain conditions in younger people. Then the rest of the time I am involved in the provision of memory clinics across east London.

You were born in Sussex but grew up in Belfast?

Yes my father had been a major in the army during the war and when that finished he took us back to live in Northern Ireland, where he was from. Belfast then was like living all the time on top of a bomb that was about to go off. I had an English accent, but an Irish name, so both sides tended to give me a rough time to begin with.

You lived a long time in the States and Canada, what brought you back?

I got sort of stuck in Canada, my wife is French Canadian, we had two daughters there, and I had a daughter from a previous relationship, so we stayed. We lived there for 25 years, but after about 15 I was ready to come back, I was homesick, but for England rather than Ireland.

You started as a psychotherapist?

I did private practice psychotherapy in Canada and the US. I studied Reichian techniques of breathing and expression of emotion and so on. Then I moved into working in public health systems and using practical neuropsychology more. I don't have huge faith in the possibility of psychotherapy to change people as I used to. In fact, I now think poetry has more capacity to change people than psychotherapy. If you read a poem and it gets to you, it can shift your perspective in quite a big way, and writing a poem, even more so.

Is that one of the reasons you have put yourself forward for the role of professor of poetry at Oxford?

Not really. The Oxford thing was a long way from my mind, but my book of poems was published last year at about the same time that the Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott scandal, as it were, blew up. And a friend said: you should run. And I thought, well, perhaps I should. For two reasons: one, because when I went to Oxford I met Robert Graves, who was then professor of poetry, and we had one or two extremely close conversations that meant a lot to me. I would love to think a really good professor of poetry would be like that, would be available, talk to people. Second, Graves packed the halls with students from all faculties, scientists as well as Eng Lit. It is not so much that I want the job, just that I would like to be in the position to give those lectures.

Has work been done in studying the effects of reading poetry on the brain?

Neuropsychology can help to explain poetry, to demystify the impulse. There has been work done on why poetry can send shivers down our spine. The poem activates the same parts of the brain that react when a child is separated from its mother. A deep sense of separation and longing.

To borrow from psychoanalysis, do you think poetry gives closure on emotions?

I do think they finish things off, yes. Most of my poems are written in the heat of emotional things. I publish them much later. Someone once asked my wife what my poems were about. And she replied "what torments him". Because I am almost too close to them, it has taken me almost until last year to read them to other people.

Does a poem like your 'Desire in Belfast', which looks back on a teenage romantic encounter, come to you fully formed?

I was driving along an icy road in Canada and I pulled off the road to write it. About two-thirds of it, 60 odd lines, arrived right there. It was triggered by an anniversary actually, I suddenly realised part of it had happened exactly 30 years before.

It is almost as if memories have a shape or a syntax of their own?

I think you are right. It is not for nothing I work in memory clinics. I grew up mainly in Northern Ireland. Over there, the word "mind" and the word "remember" are interchangeable. I think they were synonymous for Shakespeare, too.

If we are anything as individuals, we are the sum of our memories?

Absolutely, or we certainly are not ourselves without memory. I deal with people whose memory function is patchy. I think it was Buñuel who said "loss of memory is loss of self". From what I observe that is true.

Does that make you fear memory loss?

I certainly wouldn't like it. Though, for example, Graves was quite demented in later life and wrote some wonderful poetry at the onset of that, so perhaps sometimes poetry can break through that impairment.